Individual Retirement Accounts

Israel Briceno has been too busy running his tamale shop to think about saving for retirement. And no one at Briceno's bank has ever suggested he start putting money aside for when he's done working. But now that a local legislator has introduced a bill to create a state-sponsored IRA, Briceno, 28, is interested in signing up along with his mother, Maria Morales, and one other full-time worker at the aptly named Mom's Tamales in Lincoln Heights.

IF your retirement garden -- specifically your individual retirement account or IRA -- hasn't been growing fast enough to meet your future retirement needs, you might want to join a club of contrarians: those who have decided to take matters into their own hands. Literally. Self-directed IRAs are billed as "putting the 'I' back in IRA." They let individuals determine what, when and where to invest their retirement money.

Americans accumulated a record $16.4 trillion in retirement accounts as of the end of 2006, up 11% from a year earlier, the Investment Company Institute said. The total included $4.2 trillion in individual retirement accounts, $4.1 trillion in defined contribution accounts such as 401(k)s, $2.3 trillion in company-sponsored pension plans, $4.2 trillion in government pension plans and $1.6 trillion in retirement annuities, the mutual fund industry trade group said.

Thanks to a federal budget bill signed into law this month, using bank accounts to store large sums for retirement may become a more attractive option. The legislation contains long-sought reforms to federal deposit insurance, which covers as much as $100,000 per depositor. The biggest change: Starting no later than November, depositors will get as much as $250,000 in insurance coverage for retirement accounts. The amount covered in other accounts will stay at $100,000.

New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer sued H&R Block Co. on Wednesday, accusing the nation's largest tax preparer of steering clients into individual retirement accounts that Spitzer said "were virtually guaranteed to lose money" because of hidden fees and low returns. H&R Block has opened nearly 600,000 individual retirement accounts since 2001 for its tax customers.

Fidelity Investments on Wednesday said investors sent 62% more money into the world's biggest mutual fund firm's retirement accounts in early 2006 as Americans took bigger steps to prepare for retirement. The sharp jump comes at a time when research studies show that Americans, who long had relied on increasingly scarce company pensions for retirement income, face gloomy prospects because many have not saved enough to live comfortably after leaving their jobs. Between Jan.

As President-elect Barack Obama and lawmakers attempt to reach agreement on what sort of stimulus package has the best chance of arresting America's economic free fall, the enormity of the immediate crisis naturally pushes any issue that can be deferred to the margin. As a consequence, there's been little discussion of the way in which this economic implosion has exposed the utter failure of the now-ubiquitous 401(k) retirement accounts.

California would manage retirement plans for employees of small businesses under a bill proposed by the Assembly's assistant majority leader and backed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The program would be administered by the California Public Employees' Retirement System and would be open to employees of businesses without retirement plans. The state would be the first to implement such a program, according to material provided by Assemblyman Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles), the bill's author.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that people who file for bankruptcy protection can keep the money saved in their individual retirement accounts. The unanimous decision throws a financial lifeline to the growing number of older Americans who are overwhelmed by debt after losing a job or getting hit by extraordinary costs for healthcare. Last year, more than 1.6 million people filed for personal bankruptcy -- nearly double the number a decade ago.

Re "Experts Are at a Loss on Investing," May 11: Peter Gosselin must be in the same camp as he portrays others in the article. Conservative indexed stock funds and bond funds are plentiful and require no effort to achieve results better than the current 1.5% earned on Social Security funds. Your negative bias and assumption that private accounts could not be done properly are misleading. Are you saying federal government workers are much smarter than the rest of us? And, by the way, it is voluntary.